The evolution of content (e.g., video, voice, and other data) delivery from analog to digital, combined with ever-decreasing costs of terrestrial hardware to carry data traffic, have created an economic incentive to converge company and other institutional backbones (e.g., Internet backbone) with regional networks for carrying data (e.g., Internet, video, and voice traffic) over the same infrastructure, thus taking advantage of cost savings by significantly reducing the number of downlinks for satellite content acquisition, such as, for example, from one downlink per region, to a couple of downlinks for the entire country.
In the context of an illustrative video delivery system, for example, one challenge in transporting video streams over an Internet backbone is how to handle network failure and ensuing reconvergence of the network. When a router or link fails, routing protocols detect the failure and reconverge (i.e., reconfigure or remap) the network's routing topology within a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. During the time that reconvergence is occurring, data traffic flow, and thus the video stream being viewed by an end user, halts until reconvergence of unicast routing and rebuilding of a multicast tree is completed. This latency is particularly detrimental to the delivery of time-sensitive data packets found, for example, in voice and video streaming applications.
Although there are known methods which seek to minimize the impact of network events and failures by attempting to decrease the duration of network reconvergence, such conventional methods add significant operational complexity to the network. Moreover, these conventional approaches require the network to perform at a higher level to meet the needs of a specific application, rather than improving an application's resiliency to successfully operate within the existing performance envelope of the network.
Accordingly, conventional approaches for reducing the impact of network failures on content delivery are undesirable or unacceptable, particularly in the context of streaming video and voice applications which are highly sensitive to latency issues.